Thursday 5 January 2017

FindMyPast releases more Irish Dog Licence records

FindMyPast recently uploaded an additional 900,000 records to its Irish Dog Licences collection.

Licences were issued by the Petty Sessions Courts and some of the records date back to 1866. However, records from some of the courts don't start until much later, sometimes as late as the 1900s. The collection covers all 26 counties in the Republic of Ireland.

Among the details recorded in the Licence Registers are the name and residence of the owner, the breed or breed group of the dog and its colour and sex.

Dog licences were introduced to enable the authorities to track down the owners of nuisance dogs ie those who worried sheep or caused damage.

There's a list of the courts covered by the collection on FindMyPast here, but it doesn't appear to have been updated to include those courts featuring in this most recent upload.

A total of more than 7.3million dog licence records are now in the collection.